Nearly 60 people have been killed and dozens injured in a series of car bombings across Baghdad. The blasts, which took place in predominantly Shiite districts, are the latest in a surge of violence in Iraq.

At least 14 cars exploded across the city on Tuesday, RT Arabic
correspondent Ashraf al-Azzawi reported.

The deadliest explosion took place on a busy street in the
northern Talbiya neighborhood, killing nine people.

Two other car bombs exploded in the Hussainiya district in the
north of the capital, killing 10 people.

"I saw a fireball and a huge cloud of smoke. We couldn't
approach immediately fearing a second bomb, but we could hear the
screams of people asking for help," Ali Jameel, a policeman
in a patrol stationed in Hussainiya, told Reuters.

"A minute later a second blast happened nearby. Bodies were
lying on the ground and some of the wounded were crawling to
distance themselves from the blaze, leaving a trail of blood
behind them.”

Car bombs also exploded near a police station in the western
neighborhood of Sadiyah, killing six and wounding 15 others.

Police confirmed that another blast at a central square in the
commercial district of Karradah killed six people and wounded 14
others.

Another attack targeted the house of a member of a Sunni
organization known as the Sahwa militia – a security force
opposed to Al-Qaeda. Gunmen stormed his home in a southern suburb
of the capital, according to police and hospital officials.

Members of the Sahwa militia aided US troops in the fight against
Al-Qaeda in the Iraq war and have since been targeted by
insurgents blaming the organization for treason.

Two people were also shot dead in Baghdad's southern Dora
neighborhood. Another four bodies with gunshot wounds were found
across the Iraqi capital, officials said.

The attacks were reportedly coordinated, although no one has yet
claimed responsibility for the events.

Some experts believe that the increased violence in Iraq is
linked to Syria’s civil war and other conflicts in the region.

“There is a connection to the events on the ground in Syria,
in Lebanon, in Egypt. And for months now, the Saudi government
was pouring money into Sunni insurgents who were a major part of
the violence and terrorism going on in Iraq,” Jeff Steinberg
of the Executive Intelligence Review Magazine told RT.

“It is part of a larger regional strategy of basically
promoting Sunni versus Shia conflict, which has a big
geopolitical factor with Saudi Arabia competing with Iran for who
is going to be the dominant power in the Persian Gulf
region.”

The country is currently engulfed in the worst wave of violence
in five years, as Shiite, Sunni, and ethnic Kurdish factions
continue to divide the country.

Elsewhere in Iraq Tuesday, gunmen shot and killed Sunni cleric
Abdul-Karim Mustafa near the al-Taqwa mosque in the southern city
of Basra. A car bomb exploded at a restaurant in the town of
Jbala, killing two people and wounded seven others.

According to UN estimates, more than 4,000 people have been
killed over the past five months – 800 of those deaths took
occurred in the month of August.